Silt
“[F]or someone else’s sorrow, we must reserve our deepest bow.”
Kathleen Hill, “The Anointed”
After two weeks in wet weather, a rescuer
pulls his body from the Cumberland, eight miles
downstream from his fall in early March—intoxication,
drowning, months for the autopsy’s no foul play.
Every local broadcast his mother’s words
splinter like ribs, tears rivering her face.
Ten years ago, my phone rang—mid-morning,
first of January. I accepted the charges,
leaned in, heard my son’s clouded voice
say jail. Last night, shots of tequila,
he couldn’t locate his friends, his hotel, somehow—
he doesn’t know—landed in a patrol car,
hauled to a chilly cell in a strange city.
He is safe, the day still whole, melon
uncut, sandbags quelling flood. Our children—
some stumbling into waterways, dazed
among gray buildings, or absent from turned-back
beds, video games tinkling tinny scripts.
The mother of the drowned boy can’t find language
to hold her pain. She dredges the clammy silt
again. My almost-losses swallow me like water.